Alfred Tarski Quotes
Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher and one of the founders of modern mathematical logic and model theory. After his early career in the Lwow-Warsaw school of analytic philosophy, he was stranded in the United States by the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and spent the rest of his life at the University of California, Berkeley, where he trained generations of logicians. The quotes below are attributed to Alfred Tarski, organized by topic.
Browse Alfred Tarski by topic
Alfred Tarski on Knowledge
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Decidability is the dream and rarely the reality of formal systems.”
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“Introduction to Logic: and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences. (1941/2013) Tr. Olaf Helmer, pp. 108-110.”
Logic is justly considered the basis of all other sciences , even if only for the reason that in every argument we employ concepts taken from the field of logic, and that ever correct inference proceeds in accordance with its laws. -
“There can be no doubt that the knowledge of logic is of considerable practical importance for everyone who desires to think and infer correctly.”
Introduction to Logic: and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences. (1941/2013) Tr. Olaf Helmer, p. 109. -
“It is perhaps worth while saying that semantics as conceived in this paper (and in former papers of the author) is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions to being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflicts. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense.”
p. 17; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 90. -
“It is perhaps worth while saying that semantics as conceived in this paper (and in former papers of the author) is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions to being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflicts. Nor is semantics a ”
p. 17; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 90. -
“If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.”
p. 41. -
“For reasons mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot offer here a precise structural definition of semantical category and will content ourselves with the following approximate formulation: two expressions belong to the same semantical category if (I) there is a sentential function which contains one of these expressions, and if (2) no sentential function which contains one of these e”
p. 45; as cited in: Schaff (1962) pp. 36-37.
Alfred Tarski on Mind
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“Logic is justly considered the basis of all other sciences , even if only for the reason that in every argument we employ concepts taken from the field of logic, and that ever correct inference proceeds in accordance with its laws.”
Introduction to Logic: and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences. (1941/2013) Tr. Olaf Helmer, pp. 108-110.
Alfred Tarski on Truth
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Snow is white if and only if snow is white.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Truth in a formalized language can be defined by recursion on the structure of its sentences.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Logic must distinguish object language from metalanguage to escape the liar.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“A theory may admit several non-isomorphic models, each as legitimate as the others.”
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“The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages" (1931) in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938 (1956) Tr. J. H. Woodger.”
The present article is almost wholly devoted to a single problem— the definition of truth . Its task is to construct—with reference to a given language— a materially adequate and formally correct definition of the term 'true sentence' . This problem, which belongs to the classical problems of philosophy, raises considerable difficulties. For although the meaning of the term 'true sentence' in coll